MediaBytes with Shelly Palmer » Featured Bloggers

You Can’t Have it Both Ways

Dorian Benkoil — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:58 +0000

In spite of all the new ability to measure. digital media also present new challenges in figuring out what works. This thought gelled for me during a Naked Media discussion with Erin Byrne and Ben Ezrick, both leading digital strategists, he for Ogilvy, she for Burson-Marsteller. We watched the Bronze Lion-winning but fake JC Penney ad that has finally been removed from YouTube after getting hundreds of thousands of views. The commercial was since withdrawn from the awards, apparently.The video shows two teenagers “Speed Dressing,” timing themselves as they put on their clothes after undressing to “get away with it” in the girl’s basement — a message a Penney marketing manager has said the company would never condone. But the company has also gotten a lot of notice for the ad, which, as The Wall Street Journal points out , may curry favor with more urban teens, especially on the coasts. So, for a mass brand like Penney, they condemn the ad. But they, perhaps, reap the benefits of the branding in a measurable way — hundreds of thousand saw the video before it was pulled, and it’s now available on other sites. Ezrick, in the Naked Media segment, points out that neither Penney nor its ad agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, have yet completely explained how the ad got to be entered in the Cannes awards contest, nor how or whether exactly how people affiliated with them were involved in producing the video.Both Ezrick and Byrne point out that Penney can’t have it both ways: If they genuinely don’t condone the video, they need to investigate and reveal how it came to be to the best of their knowledge. If they had something to do with it, they must say so, and, if need be, apologize honestly for any discomfort or harm they may have caused. But what they can’t do is reap the benefits of the video going viral and also be upset while they gain brand awareness. You also can’t, in a digital age, segment audiences as you could in a previous era, showing one ad to the coasts, say, and another to “Middle America.” Perhaps digital media means everything is outed, eventually. And that means we have to be more honest, or at least more consistent.Dorian Benkoil is the founder of Teeming Media, and the host of Naked Media, produced in partnership with Scribe Media.

Share This

Widgets Aren’t the Thing

Dorian Benkoil — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:17:38 +0000

Distributed content, yes. ways of getting people to import and export without having to go through any specific website, sure. But widgets, per se? Nah. That’s in a sense what VC Fred Wilson (above) thinks. Fred talked about a “river” of content, in a stream, as on his Tumblr, without any sidebars, or widgets that disrupt and are disjointed and can easily be ignored in sidebars, not to mention greatly slow the loading of the page. Event organizer Matthew Finley told me privately that maybe widgets aren’t the right thing to hang this conference on, that maybe next year (the second, which he hopes will make a profit), they’ll expand or better position it to include the larger message of what this is.

I like the idea that someone can get only what they want — perhaps Fred’s musings on financials, without his musical selections. Different tastes, and the ultimate “widgetization” of content, to where I can say give me this of this person and that of that blog, and assemble it for me as I want. Maybe I WANT to be able to ignore something most days, but know it’s there when I want to glance.

Fred calls this “The Implicit Web,” and it’s something you don’t have to even ask for. A user’s action and behaviors “should inform the browser as to what services to call up.”I should have a different experience when he comes to his blog than you, and should be what the Web collectively knows about me, vs. you.

I interviewed Fred and Stowe Boyd on tape, and hope to have it soon. Also, Fred’s keynote. One striking thing Fred said: “A friend named Darren whom I’ve never met” who did a widget mashup for him. One of the striking things he didn’t talk about: money. For a VC, he seems rather unconcerned with making revenues from this stuff.

= = = = =
Dorian Benkoil is SVP and Editorial Director of Teeming Media.

Share This

The Coming Conflict With Mobile Carriers

Dorian Benkoil — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:58:14 +0000

UPDATE: A carrier exec gives a rebuttal.= = = = = Spend almost any time with people in the mobile (meaning mobile phone) content, advertising or applications industry, and you’ll surely hear something about how the cell phone carriers are making life more difficult for them. At the Mobile Marketing Forum in New York today: Rene Rodriguez of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.: “We still often don’t even know who our users are … Targeting our users in arena, our fans, and I have no access to that information” because the carriers refuse to share it. Gene Keenan, VP, Mobile Strategies, Isobar (ad agency holding company): “In some instances we can’t target as well on the mobile phone as online [because demographic information such as age] is held pretty closely” by the carriers. And, he says, he isn’t allowed to give content away, even though many brands want to, as part of a marketing or branding campaign. Tom Daly, Group Manager, Strategy & Planning, Global Interactive Marketing, The Coca-Cola Company: Carriers are making it tough to bring content to consumers for free (because they see it as competition to premium content. “We created 20,000 songs, 15,000 artists in Europe … We created a great platform for everybody … You share it with us, we’ll share with the world. The artist wins, the consumer wins. We hope some of that love wears off on Coca Cola.” But it’s not easily done. And on and on, like at a recent iBreakfast where Randy Haldeman of Apptera says that mobile so far is about 99% spam free, because the carriers block it, but they’re responsible for whatever spam there is. The arguments I’ve heard in favor of the carriers are:

*They can’t just enable everything on their networks, make it an Internet-like free-for-all, because they need to protect the golden goose: voice communication. They can’t let a bazillion people sending rich ads and video and pictures clog or freeze the network and endanger their biggest most important task. They’ve invested a lot to build their networks, which are not government-initiated with multiple agnostic redundancies, as is/was the Internet, and also have to recoup that investment.* When I said content creators are complaining about the amount carriers charge for their content, one carrier exec said to me that there is no real reason content makers should be able to charge for the same content multiple times on different platforms. Not sure I understand the argument, but it is what he said.

Regardless of the arguments, though, the tide is, I think, turning away from the restrictive nature of carriers, their locked phones and their plans. Not only is Google Android coming, which will create open standards for cellphones on new network bandwidth (if I understand correctly), but the Supreme Court has allowed a case to go through that will challenge restrictions on unlocking phones. Add all the voices of the Mobile Marketing Association and friends, and you’ve got quite a clamor for more openness and fewer restrictions. Government policy here in the U.S. allowed cellphone networks to develop as competitive fiefdoms, rather than a blanket network with a single standard, and we’re paying the price for that today, with all the restrictiveness, confusion (quick, tell me the rules of your mobile plan, in detail), plethora of mismatched services and devices, and the U.S. lag in many ways behind other countries.

Share This

Sex Sells in Mobile

Dorian Benkoil — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:38:44 +0000

Adult content is a big application for mobile search, says Farhan Memon, senior product manager of AOL Mobile Search. Speaking at a iBreakfast meeting in New York, Memon noted that AOL blocks terms that would look for illegal content (think “teen” or “underage”), but is looking for ways to appropriately allow other searches, and monetization of the search, such as … Mobile is “about things that are not meant to be consumed in public,” he said.Other things discussed:

PPC — Pay Per CALL (not click) … in other words, someone clicking on an ad on their phone to call a number. Something only phones can do.- Localization on phones. Geographically targeted ads can be served because a lot of queries on phones are geographically specific — what times the movie here, or where’s a restaurant. Phone numbers can be correlated, too, though they’re less reliable for obvious reasons (people move around and take their numbers with them). Can’t yet triangulate location based on cell towers because the carriers aren’t allowing it. One targeted ad from a company called Apptera let a singer, Rianna, tell folks who’d asked for a message from her tell them that she’d be in concert in their city (New York).

No single form of advertising is enough to cover the cost of content. That’s why AOL is putting as many as four different kinds of ads on mobile search pages (SERPs), according to Memon.

There’s a burgeoning market of women over the age of 35 using text messages to communicate with their children, according to Randy Haldeman of Apptera.- Mobile is 99% spam free, he says. (Carriers are the main culprits, he says, while blocking spam in general.)

Mobile search takes off at the time when computer-based search lessens. IE, as people leave their desks at the end of the day and on weekends, they’re using their devices, instead.

On the last point: I wouldn’t be surprised if mobile content takes money away from computer based search over time — if people doing localized ads in Google and Yahoo start to put them into mobile in a couple years. In fact, I think it’s fairly likely that it will. Which is probably one of the reasons Google is coming on strong in mobile. (And it’s not talked about a lot, but Yahoo already has a big presence.) Today, mobile search has not developed to where folks are finding mobile sites serendipitously — so a lot of marketing is being done to get folks to use the mobile sites that are created. That will change, over time, and I bet we’ll start to see SEO and SEM for mobile sites.

Share This

What the cable companies (and TiVo) could learn from Facebook

Joshua Beil — Thu, 29 May 2008 04:39:49 +0000

By guest blogger, Joshua Beil

Whether you agree with the $15B valuation or not, Facebook has unleashed a pair of technical innovations that has fundamentally shaped the social media landscape: the first was the personal feed and the second was an open platform for third-party development. The former has been copied by other social networks like LinkedIn and spawned an entire cottage industry of startups around “lifecasting,” the most notable being FriendFeed. The later has resulted in over ten thousand applications developed to date, with a separate cottage industry having mushroomed around social networking applications – the most notable names being Slide and RockYou.

Both of Facebook’s innovations could and should be used by the cable companies (and TiVo) to reinforce its incumbent dominance in the battle for living room supremacy and fend off the onslaught of attacks underway, most notably from Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft’s Xbox. The key in both cases is in harnessing the power of the set top box, both its rich database and as a platform.

TV Viewing Feeds: As we officially enter the age of digital TV, with the right database in place, the cable companies ought to know all facets of our viewing behavior. This could be turned into a personal feed that would enable your social graph to know what you watch and/or record and when. This is probably way too much information for most, but key user-specified filters in place such as notifying you if your friend is watching (or watched) the same show, or noting shows that your friends have watched that you have never seen might be very valuable to some. An obvious problem that would need to be solved is the multiple members of a household watching the same TV, so there would need to be some sort of user login/authentication that takes place in order for such a service to work effectively.

Platform Leverage: What if instead of a walled garden viewing experience, our set top box had a set of APIs that allowed third party developers to write applications to talk to it? Combine that with a Bluetooth or WiFi transmitter baked into the device, and imagine the possibilities of communication, synchronization and convergence with your computer, smart phone, and yes, car’s AV system.

The cable companies have an opportunity to take advantage of the undeniable trends unfolding in the social media space and apply them directly to our television experience. Given the new and emerging technologies trying to disintermediate them, not doing so will quite possibly be their undoing.

Joshua Beil is the Director of Social Media & Technology at a publicly traded telecommunications company. He was previously the CEO and cofounder of Skywave Broadband, Inc, a commercial WiFi service provider in Hawaii. He was named one of Pacific Business News’ Forty Under 40 for 2006, and in 2005, he was named a High Tech Leader by the Pacific Technology Foundation. Before co-founding Skywave, Mr. Beil was VP of Research and Development for the market research boutique, Tier 1 Research, where he covered the Internet infrastructure sector as an analyst, and negotiated and sold subscriptions to Tier 1’s research services. He maintains a private consulting practice specializing in the Internet infrastructure industry. Josh has previously served as the Senior Analyst for Exodus Communications as well as the internationally known market research firm, IDC. He holds a Certificate in E-Business from UCSC Extension, and he graduated with honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a major in Psychology.
Blog: www.beilblog.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jhbeil

Share This

The Coming Shakeouts — Report From Streaming Media East

Dorian Benkoil — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:52:06 +0000

One big impression from the Streaming Media East show I got today: There are going to be shakeouts:- in content distribution networks, CDNs. There are too many to be supported by the market, even if the market IS growing 30% per year. How many do you need. There’s Akamai. And there’s Limelight. And then there are more than two-dozen others, about half of them with venture funding (too much VC $$$, according to one person — see Twitters in right column ), all claiming one niche or another. But those niches can’t support it all.- in standards. H.264. Adobe. Silverlight. These are all schemes for making videos and then getting them to the Web and into a browser or some other player that you can watch on your computer. But it’s difficult to create in one and post in another. There’s a rumor Microsoft will have Silverlight be agnostic, adopt H.264, and allow posting from all kinds of media into it, which could — in the words of one observer — revolutionize the industry. (Wouldn’t that be something? Microsoft being the open ones.) for now, though, creators of the content are locked into different not terribly overlapping universes and the skills are not really transferable.- In video advertising. A bazillion schemes. Only some will survive.- In video intake and display through the competitors to YouTube — everyone from Revver to Veoh to Brightcove to Daily Motion. Fewer than exist today will survive.Talked a bit, too, to show chief Dan Rayburn, who said part of the reason there might be less of a representation of revenue, and more of technology, than previous years at the show, is because he’s got his ear to the ground — and no one is really making money in video, while there’s been the explosion of CDNs.Coverage:- Getting Nerdy (Online Minute)- TV WorldwideMy buddies at Scribe Media (who are doing the Naked Media show with my company and me as host) produced Streaming Media’s video and will have it live in a couple days.Shelly wrote about the format wars almost a year ago.

Share This

Pulver-ama: Breakfast With the Betas

Dorian Benkoil — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:21:38 +0000

Some ventures I learned of at today’s Jeff Pulver breakfast:

Wizario. An Israeli-led recommendations engine for consumer electronics based on someone’s personality.
Semavo. Represents information in 3-D fashion “like a galaxy.” Differs from something like LivePlasma because the user defines the “galaxy” that will be at the hubs. So, of someone’s interested in a given actor or musician, they can find the links to that person with a 3D representation.
Matchmine: A media recommendation engine åthat’s supposed to learn a user’s preferences as they surf (orå serf) their partner sites and carry those preferences in a unique “MatchKey.” So, over time, the engine learns that you like cowboy movies and education blogs and smooth jazz. When I said it seemed like a good match for behavioral targeting — serve ads to people based on knowing their preferences — bizdev director Ken Gellman said they’d been thinking of that based on what others had said and that it was in New York, not the Bay Area, that he heard such advice on ads . Out West, he hears a lot of questions about the underlying technology and how to differentiate itself from other such engines. Different mindsets

Jeff Pulver, VOIP entrepreneur and co-founder of Vonage, now spends his time investing money (13 seeded ventures at the moment), writing a blog, throwing breakfasts, doing a Web TV show, and generally being as energetic as he can. (Though he did tell me he has a lot of time.) Today’s breakfast, at Friend of a Farmer near Gramercy Park, brought together a few dozen entrepreneurs, and tech/media types, including a bunch of Israelis.

Share This

Targeted Ads — For Phone Cards, of All Things

Dorian Benkoil — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:01:57 +0000

I used to joke that there isn’t enough advertising in the world. Why, I asked, can’t someone put an ad under your eyelids so every time you blink, you get to see their message? Or, perhaps, a sponsorship of each ring on your phone. “Ring … eat at McDonald’s … Ring… special sale today at Macy’s … Ring …”.

Only, now that second one’s not a joke. A company called VoodooVox is targeting ads to people who use phone cards to call internationally, part of what they call “incall media”. You may know that today you can at stores and stands and kiosks all over the world for a couple or five or ten bucks pick up one of the cards that lets you have inexpensive calls overseas using VOIP technology. The cards also come with various kinds of fees and penalties if you don’t use them quickly after activating them.

The targeting comes in because there are a bazillion offerings and permutations and combinations: cards that are cheaper from New York to Mexico, or from U.S. cellphones to Haiti, or the Philippines, or France, or between London and an African city and on and on. If someone in the U.S., say, is buying a card that’s written in Spanish and has great rates to Mexico, there’s a good chance got strong ties to that country. So, if, when dialing in to activate and use the card, an ad comes on that gives special offers to someone with an affinity for Mexico, that would be pretty decent targeting. JetBlue could advertise a special deal on flights to Puerto Rico for people using a card likely to be interested in that offer. VoodooVox has partnered with IDT and other long-distance providers to try to offering and plans (today?) to release a study from Millward Brown that shows the ads have been effective in reaching the Hispanic community.

I do see a few potential downsides: The folks buying the cards are often immigrants without a lot of disposable income. People buying the cards might get annoyed at having to listen to ads (I have been, on occasion, annoyed at an in-call announcement when I’m paying already). As easy as it can be to navigate, it’s very counterintuitive to jump away from a phone call to activate an offer, and you may not remember the offer after the call. Is there enough scale, over time? Will there be enough people calling Puerto Rico on specially identified cards to make it worth JetBlue’s while?

But it is a way of thinking about targeting ads that uses both technology and smarts to reach a targeted audience in a way that’s not all about the latest set-top boxes, or Web 2.0 applications.

Share This

Twitter and the Zeitgeist

Dorian Benkoil — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:06:23 +0000

I’ve said (and perhaps blogged — who can remember) that while I find Twittering for its own sake inane, from a societal perspective utility will come when enough people Tweet that a cloud is created to monitor the zeitgeist. So, let’s say a few hundred, or thousand, people give their thoughts on the Pope from inside his talk at Yankee Stadium. Or a bunch of people from a disaster zone (this is not them asking for help — which is also valid — but rather getting an idea of the general tenor of a situation): panicked; need help; all’s fine; more food. And so on. Amalgamate them and we can start to get a sense of what folks think or feel, at least feel enough to Tweet.

Today, BuzzMachine pointed to Twisorti, which parses for emotive words like “love” or “believe” or “wish”. It’s a start of the kinds of intelligence that will become the semantic Web. Imagine if the application were smart enough to not only search for specific words, but look at Tweets in general, and see what trends and thoughts are emerging, in general. Cross-reference that with search or SMS messages … well, you get it; it becomes a read on “society” — or at least the society that’s using the technology. (And of course, if we want to put our marketing hats on, a way for brands to monitor messages, at some point.) Even better is if and when the cloud can include not just Tweets, but all the bursts from everywhere. Like, whatever becomes the main competitor to Twitter. (Because, as we noted earlier, Twitter has a problem that may hinder its survival.)

Share This

RIAA chief encourages consumers, telecoms to shoot themselves in the face.

Israel Mirsky — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:41:30 +0000

RIAA boss Cary Sherman is in a tough spot. He heads the trade organization for a industry whose business model evolved to solve the problems of a world in which distribution was difficult, a world in which the big music labels were actually needed in order to get consumers the music that they wanted. That world is now gone, and Cary is working as hard as he can to make it clear to everyone that the companies of the RIAA are out of their element, that they do not understand the technologies driving the change in their business model and so they are doomed to endlessly attempt to stuff the internet genie back into its bottle. There is simply no room in the new, democratized production-distribution paradigm for players whose businesses depend on solving a problem that no longer exists.

In this video from the State of the Net conference in DC this past week, Cary runs down a list of possible ways to make it difficult to distribute music on the Internet again. Beginning with the “voluntary filtering” at the carrier level that AT&T is proposing (more on why that is a horrible idea for AT&T in a moment) Cary seems thrown off balance when confronted with a question on encryption. Doesn’t simple encryption defeat carrier content filtering? (yes, it does) The software solution he proposes in response actually listens to the analog audio output of the machine it is installed on and stops copyrighted works from being played out! Internet radio, anyone? Burned CD’s? Soundtracks to movies? Actually, Cary’s response is so poorly thought out I’m not at all sure he knew what he was going to say before it came out of his mouth. At one point, struggling for a reason that consumers might pollute their machines with software that would cripple them and expose their owners to litigation, Cary suggests bundling it with antivirus software. Yeah - I know lots of antivirus companies with marketshare who would just _love_ to offer that to their customers.

Putting encryption aside for a moment, if AT&T does hold hands with the RIAA and voluntarily filter content for copyrighted works, it may put itself in some serious legal trouble. This article from Tim Wu at Slate discusses some of the issues with the violations to Safe Harbor that voluntary filtering would raise. Essentially, by admitting that it can filter some content, AT&T probably exposes itself to litigation for carrying any of the copyrighted or obscene work that travels over its networks.

Traveling this road with the RIAA is unhealthy for everyone who comes along for the ride. Consumers are definitely too smart to put themselves in this kind of danger in numbers large enough to solve the RIAA’s problem; we’ll see if the telecoms turn out to have a similar instinct for self-preservation. Verizon, for one, has announced that it will sit this one out.

Share This